EXPLORING
MARKETS

What are the key trends and uncertainties likely to impact my business? And what insights can I gain to align my strategies to meet emerging challenges or capture emerging opportunities? How do I improve the quality of my organisation’s thinking about the future – its ‘strategic conversation’?

These and many other questions critical to your future can be addressed through scenario planning, a powerful and effective way to explore future business conditions. Scenario planning can be used for testing an existing or intended strategy, a value creating system, or specific investments such as technology portfolios and technology roadmaps.

Scenario planning may also help to establish common ground among different parties and organizational divisions, reach out to new co-producers, question assumptions in models or strategies, clarify ambiguous settings or research and clarify complex issues.

In practice, scenario planning involves the creation of a set of plausible, challenging, useful and relevant future contexts that an intended strategy or value creating systems design might find itself in. Very simply, scenario planning is a powerful methodology for navigating under uncertainty and adapting to unknown futures.

Offerings

Scenario
assessment

How well does your existing scenario set support strategy, innovation and technology planning in your organisation? How can its effectiveness be improved?

Introduction to scenarios

What are scenarios and how can they be used in explore future business conditions? 1/2 to 1 day to share strategic thinking based on world-class practices.

Trends and
uncertainties

What external developments and big impact forces might shape your context and the business you’re in? Research global drivers and uncertainties.

Scenario
development

Building of scenario set as qualitative stories, or quantified with modeling to explore impact on key market segments. Coaching or consulting support.

Exploring Markets – Cases

Case: Scenario assessment

A global mining company wanted a second opinion on its newly developed set of long-term scenarios. Drawing upon its expertise, NormannPartners made an objective assessment of the scenarios and the scenario planning. It was discovered that the preparations and links for scenario use in strategy and technology had been under-attended, which is often the case. The client was given clear recommendations on how to improve its scenario planning effectiveness.

Case: Introduction to scenario planning

A leading semiconductor company needed to better understand how to introduce future-thinking into their organisation. NormannPartners interviewed executives, and designed and facilitated a one-day workshop with the executive leadership team in which scenario methodology, concepts and approach were introduced. In addition, an initial exploration of their context was performed and implications derived. Finally,they evaluated how scenario planning could be used at the company. The client was given recommendations on how to build future-thinking capability.

Case: Trends and uncertainties

An international organisation for large players in the miningsector wanted an overview of global and regional macro factors – certain or uncertain – that could have a big impact on their members’ business in the medium- to long-term. NormannPartners helped them get a coherent view of these factors, enabling members to draw valuable implications for their business. In the process, the organization also strengthened the relationship between itself and its members.

Case: Scenario development

A global mining company approached NormannPartners to evaluate their existing scenarios and after doing so, decided to build a new set. They appointed NormannPartners to work with their strategy team and scenario builders across four continents to explore how the future of energy and mining might evolve over the next two decades. The insights generated by the scenarios, together with further quantification across regions and commodities, have contributed towards several transformative strategic realignments.

Case: Futuring Conference

The UK Financial Conduct Authority wanted to host a scenario-based conference on the long-term future of financial services. NormannPartners was commissioned to help deliver the conference and helped with the design of the conference and guided the client with the development of materials for the event, during 2016 and 2017. NormannPartners professionals also gave a key-note speech and facilitated the event. The conference was attended by more than 150 professionals from various different organisations in the financial services industry. For further information and to read the report, visit the FCA website.

NormannPartners helps companies and organisations understand and gain advantage in their networked world of business.